TODAY: In 1980, American oil tycoon Armand Hammer pays over $5 million — the highest ever paid for a manuscript at that time — for the Leicester Codex, a notebook containing writings by Leonardo da Vinci.
- The final judgment is here: the best book covers of 2018, as chosen by book designers. | Lit Hub
- “The sentence has to withhold its end because life is like that, refusing to fold itself neatly into subject, verb and object.” In praise of the long and complicated sentence. | Lit Hub
- “Our industrially-produced fantasies are increasingly fantasies of reality.” Screenwriter James Schamus on the business of storytelling in the age of the algorithm. | Lit Hub
- Imagining a black, queer, Aboriginal Melbourne: on the urban design and activism of Lisa Bellear. | Lit Hub
- “Finding ways to allow our media to haunt us is crucial to understanding it.” On the weird physical history of media and information. | Lit Hub
- From the Summer of Scam to Barracoon: the countdown continues of the top literary stories of 2018. | Lit Hub
- “The anger of other women can be instructive.” Rebecca Traister in conversation on the latest episode of Reading Women. | Lit Hub
- Neil Nyren on Emma Lathen, the greatest crime writer you’ve never heard of. | CrimeReads
- This week in Secrets of the Book Critics: Hannah Giorgis on Jamaica Kincaid, Vintage Addis Ababa, and Beloved Book Nerds | Book Marks
- We take a look at the five books chosen for the National Book Foundation’s Literature for Justice program, which shines a light on mass incarceration in America. | Book Marks
- On the 100th anniversary of his birth, Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s biographer reflects on the author’s anti-Soviet legacy. | The New York Times
- Best-selling Australian author Kate Morton has won a $500,000 legal battle against her former agent. | The Bookseller
- 1. Be patient. 2. Be reasonable. 6 ways to be kind to your bookseller this holiday season. | The Guardian
- “There’s a way the African American experience is almost a pre-postmodernism”: an interview with translator, poet, and MacArthur fellow John Keene. | Bookforum
- “The cover is an interface between that content and human society.” What is lost in the era of infinite browsing? | Real Life Mag
- In 2018, Michael Wolff joined Stephen King, James Patterson, and J.K. Rowling on Forbes’s list of the highest-paid authors in the world. | Forbes
- 75 notable books in translation from 2018. | World Literature Today
Also on Lit Hub: On Otherppl, Anita Felicelli talks to Brad Listi about magical realism and otherness • Rebecca Traister on Reading Women • Read from Kevin Killian’s Fascination
